GREEN ENERGY: It's a chill wind, by Wiggia

During the Covid crisis (?) there has been an undercurrent of activity around Boris’s ‘green deal’, not surprising really as without the distraction of the virus more of this would have made it into the news, in what form is another matter.

The Telegraph has put together a decent summary of all the snippets that have been leaked in the last twelve months, though it still leaves out other extra costs should this push to be carbon neutral by 2050 goes ahead as the Climate Change Committee insists it does.
 
Whether any of this is feasible is doubtful even if all the requirements could be met.
 
The DT had an article that for once was not blind to the pitfalls and obstacles in the way of achievement. It doesn’t go nearly far enough though, the costings of full implementation for the average household are enormous, and it's not clear how many of those people who are all for saving the planet realise how much they will have to pay; not many I would bet, and for what exactly? As with Covid we are only told what they want us to hear.
 
A good example of that is the news that we have today on the BBC website seen below.
 
Great Britain's electricity system was the greenest it had ever been at lunchtime on Easter Bank Holiday Monday, its operator has said.

Sunny and windy weather, coupled with low demand for power, led to a surge in renewable sources of energy, National Grid Electricity System Operator said.

It meant low-carbon energy sources made up almost 80% of Britain's power.

There was no coal generation on the grid and just 10% of power was from gas plants, the operator added.

The caveat is in there: sunny and windy weather. Without those there is no renewable energy produced; as on earlier days this month when Gridwatch showed wind producing just 0.5% on one day, that is a statistic you never see in a headline from those pushing the agenda.

Roger Harrabin the BBCs resident envoy for CC then says….”That will need much more energy storage than is currently available”. There is no storage available and no sign again of any means to capture energy that amounts to anything meaningful now or in the future as it stands.

I am not going to say any more about the failure to ensure sufficient base load for the future predicted needs, it has been well trailed with the National Grid predicting if all the proposals come into being there will be a need for a 60% hike in the base load available to fulfil the demand.

And there is no sign of anything that will make that possible on the horizon. Doubling the number of windmills doubles the amount of energy needed from elsewhere when the wind doesn’t blow, it is that simple.
 
Among the items in the DT article that have been aired are many of the obvious ones, this is the third article in the DT since October last year that has an air of disbelief that any of this can be achieved and still it is far too kind, but at least a querying voice is being raised along with doubts from the CC commmittee.

The image below shows what is being asked of the average householder; maybe not everything but the heat pumps are central to the Government's thinking.
 

What you can add to that is any property that needs these extensive works will also have to pay for all the usual home comforts that will be destroyed putting all this in: decoration, carpets, new electric instead of gas hobs, and the bigger radiatorss that are not included here as the heat pumps work at a lower temperature and to maintain today's comfort zone bigger rads will be needed.

Needless to say the official answer to lower temperatures is that it is good for our health and the air quality will improve. The next step will be living in a tent where the air quality will be even better, but you will have nowhere to hang a radiator; perhaps that is the end goal and all this is just flim flam, who knows any more.

Heat pumps have a big drawback: they work at lower temperatures, they can work at higher ones but become very expensive. With the high cost of electricity against that of gas it is going to make heat pumps a luxury, many will not switch and many will not be able to stand the cost of switching. Electricity is four times the cost of gas because of the costs passed on to the consumer from environmental programmes and social measures such as the Warm Homes Discount which gives some households cheaper energy bills. These extra costs are not added to gas bills.

Naturally some in government would like to see gas loaded with extra costs to ‘incentivise’ switching, which shows how much they live in a bubble: charge extra to get people to switch to something they will have to pay even more for!

The government's published plan to tackle climate change wants 600,000 heat pumps a year installed every year by 2028, but who wants them? Certainly no one who has thought it through; some eco zealots with deep pockets - remember, the government has withdrawn its grant scheme.

Ah, they say, the real costs as production of heat pumps increases will come down; by how much? They are so much dearer than gas boilers so they are never going to compete on price, and in that case who would be mug enough to pay for one now? Average gas boilers including fitting currently run in the £1000 bracket, depending on size and make.

Are the government's friends and backers in the building industry behind all this? Are they installing heat pumps, underfloor heating, triple glazing in the shoe boxes they call homes these days. Of course not: the building industry is there to make as much money as possible while spending as little as it can.

For decades, we have lagged behind many in Europe with our building regulations as to insulation, glazing etc. which means a large majority of the housing stock is below par in energy efficiency because successive governments have allowed it to be. Now the same government wants the general public to pay for that lack of foresight, though with the building industry the big builders have been quite happy to go along with sub-par regs as it means more for less.

In effect, the public are being asked to pay substantially more for housing. The government's response to that fact is that we should take out longer mortgages or extend current ones to pay for the upgrades; if I was in the last couple of years of a 35 year mortgage I know what my answer would be, and with average wages 20% down in real terms from 2008 who has the extra cash anyway?

People who can claim up to £240k in expenses from the public purse have no right to expect the public to pay for their fantasies, the same tax-paying public in the private sector that will also be paying for the billions required to upgrade social housing; or are the printing presses just going to keep on running?

I find it extraordinary that people like Bill Gates can lecture the world on how it should behave so as to save the planet when they themselves live a high maintenance lifestyle and don’t even justify why there should be a difference for them.

Bill Gates is not alone in being a total hypocrite but for the record he owns four private jets, a seaplane and a ‘collection’ of helicopters; he also collects Porsche cars and has the usual Mercedes and BMWs plus limousines. Recently he ordered the building of a yacht, the one omission he had in the billionaire class.

His various very large homes are supplemented by being the biggest private land owner in the USA. He currently owns 242,000 acres of prime farmland, why? He has never shown any interest in farming. It has all to do with power: land owners on that scale have always had power; it is also suggested that it is a tax avoidance scheme and probably is. Also, he was recently involved in the bid to be the largest private jet base operator; this comes as commercial jet operation slumps in the wake of the Corona virus and private jets take up the slack, for some, flying to destinations no longer being used by commercial airlines. Has any of this got anything to do with saving the planet. No, of course it hasn’t, yet, and I use Gates as a prime example, governments are in league with him and others of a similar ilk. It is nothing to do with climate change, it is about money.

Many of the big institutions and oil companies have seen the light: they are taking the easy way out of their’ dirty’ business. They see that governments and people of influence want to follow the climate change agenda, they see drilling licenses being withheld, oil exploration becoming uneconomic, so they diversify into sustainable energy. Why not? There are big subsidies awaiting them there and they spread out into energy supply and anything else that sees a government grant.

With banks and financial institutions now going green and refusing to support fossil fuel extraction the circle is almost complete.

All that is needed is enough celebs to tell us what is good for us, and we got it, a hundred signed a pledge, including Jude Law, Mel B, Cumberbatch et al and stated…

‘Like you...we are stuck in this fossil-fuel economy and, without systemic change, our lifestyles will keep on causing climate and ecological harm.’

‘Our lifestyles’: shurely shome mishtake!

There are hundreds of examples of double standards, this one by Elizabeth Warrenwho also has a problem with her ancestry takes some beating….

The one thing that comes out of all this is the fact that no one has voted for future impoverishment, no one has been asked their views as to the way forward or not on anything to do with climate change. It is all driven by vested interests, green lobbyists who only represent a small section of the population and front persons such as Gates and the doom goblin; all chant the same 'we are doomed, at the tipping point, we have only x years' and so on, it has all been heard before and nothing has come to pass, yet still billions are poured into something that we almost certainly cannot change if it does happen.

The predictions are all based on projections from the same sort of sources that projected the world was about to die from Covid, and like Professor Ferguson for reasons unexplained the same people, wrong before, are still getting a platform to spout the same garbage.

We are not getting the truth. Any dissenting views are from ‘deniers’ who are cancelled, sidelined or ridiculed for having a different view, for there can only be one way forward.

Unless some common sense is brought into the climate change debate we are all doomed, to a life of restrictions and deteriorating living standards, all at great cost. Our current economic situation says no to all this as it is not affordable even if it was necessary or desirable. Like many I am not holding my breath on this, there is something amiss and we are not getting the truth, and no one is demanding it.